Chasing American Dreams at the 1st Miss Soviet Union Beauty Pageant

The year was 1988, the iron curtain was falling and the final leader of the Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachev, was patching up foreign relations with America after a schmoozy dinner with Ronald and Nancy Reagan in Washington. The country was ushering in a new era of social freedom and a flood of information about the lives of people abroad had triggered a…

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This Ghost Town was aiming Nuclear Missiles at America from just 200km Away

When looking at abandoned places, I often think, ‘how sad’, and, ‘if only it could come back to life’. This place? Not so much. This is the secret Soviet city of Gudym, which once held enough nuclear weapons to wipe out half a continent. And during the height of the Cold War, had things gone south,…

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Buried Secrets of Montauk’s Menacing Military Camp that Inspired “Stranger Things”

There are places in New York and the northeastern coast of America, where a pleasurable trip to the seaside can take a turn for the peculiar. You may be wandering along a bucolic beach only to stumble across the abandoned ruins of brutalist concrete structures lying half buried in the sand, evoking the iconic end…

Declassified: That Time the US Military made Flying Saucers

Every once in a while, we unearth a story so out-of-this-world it deserves its own tacky sci-fi movie. Today’s story turns the clock back to 1959, when the Cold War was hot and a scientist named Jack Frost was breaking a sweat over a top-secret military project: the flying saucer. As in, an All-American UFO-level…

America’s “Secret Sonic Weapon” Against Communism

This is the story of that time the United States decided to influence countries “at-risk” of falling to communism … by introducing them to jazz. In a Cold War “Jazz Ambassador” initiative, they sent famed artists such as Louis Armstrong, Dizzy Galespie, and Duke Ellington, among others, to share “their Western music” and to hopefully, introduce some American…

A Weekend Guide to Europe’s Most Underrated City

The most exciting, up-and-coming city in Germany probably isn’t your first guess. For many years, Berlin had the reputation as the hip & happening capital of Europe. But soaring rents – as much as 70% more expensive over the past 8 years – have all but gentrified Berlin into a shadow of its former self.…

Why NASA Set up Shop in Russia’s Forbidden Star City

Tucked in a Russian forest not terribly far from Moscow, you’ll find it: a veritable mini-city, populated entirely by space explorers and their kin for over half-a-century. This is “Star City,” and getting an invite here is a bit like making it into Wonka’s Chocolate Factory; it’s the world’s oldest habitation of its kind, a…

Stalin’s Fashion House: Style Spying behind the Iron Curtain

For many, “Soviet fashion” reads like an oxymoron. One simply can’t imagine that funding fashion ateliers was high up on Joseph Stalin’s to-do list, and it wasn’t, but still — it was there, and apparently it was utterly extravagant. “Eclectic mannequins were turning slowly as they displayed rather bewildering clothes,” wrote Elsa Schiaparelli of the…

Documenting a Stasi Prison

On East German maps of the time, the prison simply didn’t exist, marked only with a blank space. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, unlike many other government and military institutions in East Germany, the former prison was not stormed by demonstrations, allowing the authorities to destroy evidence of what went on there. Twenty…

The Charming Village with a Billion Dollar Secret

Disguised by two seemingly innocent village homes, none of the locals of Cochem knew that for two decades during the height of the Cold War, 15 Billion German Mark– the vault of West Germany’s central bank– was being stashed below the streets of their sleepy town nestled in the slopes of the Mosel valley. As…